Creating good user experiences (UX) over and over again means creating first good employee experiences (EX - I’m trademarking that!). That’s the lesson from Southwest airlines according to an NY Times article about retiring co-founder Herbert Kelleher:

Over the years, whenever reporters would ask him the secret to Southwest’s success, Mr. Kelleher had a stock response. “You have to treat your employees like customers,” he told Fortune in 2001. “When you treat them right, then they will treat your outside customers right. That has been a powerful competitive weapon for us.”…

[W]hen you look at a company like American, with its poisonous employee relations and its glum customer base, and compare it with Southwest, with its happy employees and contented customers, you can’t help thinking that Mr. Kelleher was on to something when he put employees first. “There isn’t any customer satisfaction without employee satisfaction,” said Gordon Bethune, the former chief executive of Continental Airlines, and an old friend of Mr. Kelleher’s. “He recognized that good employee relations would affect the bottom line. He knew that having employees who wanted to do a good job would drive revenue and lower costs.”

This isn’t really surprising for a service company like Southwest, but the same rule applies, I believe, to companies that make products. Employee happiness often comes from walking the walk — in other words not just making big pronouncements about how much you love your employees (Kelleher wept when talking about his employess in his going-away speech), but in seeing those through in actions big and small. And often it’s the small ones  that show how you actually mean. It’s kind of like what they say about ethics - it’s what you do when nobody’s looking.

These small touches to how you treat employees are often the most intimate ones, and they communicate how deeply felt the relationship is (or not, as the case may be). Southwest, for example, seems to give its flight staff a great deal of autonomy when it comes to how they intereact with passengers, but bounded by some established guidelines. This has famously led to some staff singing the safety announcements and adding comedic commentary (I once heard one say “There may be fifty ways to leave your lover, but there are only four ways off this big bird!”). It also probably led to the more recent episodes of passengers getting walked off planes for risque clothing…just goes to show that what constitutes a “good” UX is different for different people.

While any company can luck out with one-off good experiences, a long term systemic philosophy of treating employees right fosters a mindset that is focused on thinking about the needs of others, which ideally translates into the products the employees create for the company’s customers.

Cable TV companies are famously indifferent to user experiences, and my provider, Comcast, recently showcased one example. They finally started allowing previews of on-demand movies, but check out how they managed to  mess up the experience:

That giant blue box stays on screen for the entire duration of the preview, obscuring a good chunk of it (even more for non-widescreen previews than what you see here). It’s really distracting.

You wouldn’t see something like this if Southwest ran a cable system.

References:

The Sinatra of Southwest Feels the Love, NY Times

Org Chart 2.0: Built for User Experience Systems

I was recently shopping for a new bike helmet and I was struck by a realization: Is there another category with lower differentiation amongst the different brands?

Above is a representative sampling of helmets from four different manufacturers: Bell, Giro, Louis Garneau, and Specialized. I’ve removed the logos. Can you tell one brand from another? I certainly can’t. (Answer at the end of the post)

The bike helmet category, so far as I can see, is primarily style driven, as all the helmets have to meet minimum safety standards determined by a couple of third party organizations. The differences in weight and comfort between the lower end and upper end helmets (a price range of $40 to over $200) are marginal. The major difference is in the amount of cooling — the upper end helmets have larger vent holes — but contrary to a few years ago even the middling helmets are good in this respect. The $60 Bell I picked up cools much better than my five year old $100+ Specialized.

A significant incentive in many bike purchases is what pro’s are using, and having bragging rights to the latest gear. In that case you would expect more obvious differences at the upper end — if there’s isn’t a strong visible tiering, or a strong brand identity through the product design, then only a tiny number of people will be able to spot that you’re wearing the latest and greatest, which dilutes the incentive to spring for the expensive stuff.

Bell Sports owns Giro, who was the originator of the bare-styrofoam helmet that dramatically reduced weight over the older style that had a hard plastic shell. Typically when a company acquires another one they want to keep a differentiation between them, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here. Based on my experience, the two brands seem tailored for slightly different shape heads (Giro = rounder, Bell = elliptical). Other than that they are largely the same. Between the two of them they dominate the category; I don’t have stats but I’m guessing 80%. Perhaps they’re just a bit complacent due to their almost-monopoly?

It’s odd that in such a style driven category that all the manufacturers have basically converged on a single aesthetic and stuck to it. In fairness, designing anything to go on the head is a tricky and highly constrained exercise and one of the most difficult things to design, but this level of conformity is still very odd. How about a little choice so we don’t all look like racer wannabe’s with Trilobites stuck to our skulls?

(Brands answer, clockwise from top-left: Giro, Specialized, Louis Garneau, Giro, Bell, Bell)

Isn’t it interesting that in the latest airline quality rankings the top three spots were taken by low-cost carriers? JetBlue, Southwest and AirTran ranked the best while overall the industry had its worst ratings in twenty years.

Just goes to show that providing a leading user experience does not have to mean premium price. All three are relative start-ups compared to the likes of United and American, and they have been able to structure themselves (and therefore their) costs based on lessons learned from the older airlines.

Nevertheless, with issues like number of passengers bumped per flight, amount of baggage lost, and late flights that the survey measured, it’s hard to see how these three airlines would have intrinsic benefits over their older competitors.

There is also a more intangible difference between JetBlue and Southwest compared to most other carriers: the atmosphere on the ground and the plane that emanates from the staff. It is more relaxed, more can-do, more enjoyable. One can always find one-off examples at other airlines, of course, but the widespread nature of it at these two airlines (I have not flown AirTran recently so cannot comment) makes it clear there is systemic approach to managing and encouraging this atmosphere.

(And neither Southwest or JetBlue are perfect: JetBlue had its famed debaucle with passengers stranded for hours on runways in snow conditions, and Southwest is currently not looking so good with questionable maintenance practices. If you raise the user experience bar high, the punishment is extra hard if you fail to meet it consistently.)

People often think of good user experiences as uncontrollable black magic. Nothing could be further from the truth, as JetBlue, Southwest and AirTran show: even in a highly cost-sensitive industry there is room to make it a competitive differentiator. And not just for premium brands.

Given its rather grotty patina I’m not sure if I’d actually want to plug into this, but it’s an interesting concept. This poster of a stereo receiver has a headphone jack sticking out of it that plays a continuous loop of John Legend music, courtesy of Target. Nice way to take advantage of the fact that people have headphones with them anways these days, and are more open to interactive advertising experiments. Still, standing in a subway corridor plugged into the wall with lots of other people brushing by is a little off-putting.

(Spotted in NY subway) 

Neatorama has put together a nice little collection of progression of famous tech company logos.

You’ve seen these tech logos everywhere, but have you ever wondered how they came to be? Did you know that Apple’s original logo was Isaac Newton under an apple tree? Or that Nokia’s original logo was a fish?

The history lessons are nice, though one I’m a bit skeptical of the veracity:

Jobs thought that the overly complex [Newton] logo had something to do with the slow sales of the Apple I, so he commissioned Rob Janoff of the Regis McKenna Agency to design a new one. Janoff came up with the iconic rainbow-striped Apple logo used from 1976 to 1999.

Anyone have verification of whether Jobs actually thought this? While it would be amazing if a logo did have the actual power to slow down sales, I’m rather skeptical of that too.